Efecto de proliferación de linfocitos T mediante

BirdLife Europe’s senior head of policy, Ariel Brunner, tells PEN why better

implementation of the Birds and Habitats Directives, increased funding and

greater innovation are vital to Nature conservation efforts

Loggerheads are the most common turtle in the Mediterranean, but they are under threat from tourism, fishing and pollution GOV19 A Brunner IV 6116 RPT ST19 atl_Layout 1 21/07/2016 12:09 Page 1

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sense, there is a space for guidance from the commission and also for creating new platforms to allow member states to talk to each other and to stakeholders, businesses and NGOs in order to ensure that the things that work are exported to the rest of Europe, e.g. management of Natura 2000 sites, species protection plans, etc. In some places you end up with horrible bureaucratic entanglements – businesses complaining that they are being paralysed, NGOs complaining that Nature conservation is not working – when often, just across the border in another member state or another region, there is a very efficient system in place which is enabling very good conservation, low levels of bureaucracy, and happy entrepreneurs. There’s huge scope for bringing people together, seeing what works, and then seeing if what works in one place will work in another.

The mid-term review of the biodiversity strategy to 2020 highlighted insufficient financing as a key reason why the EU failed to meet its 2010 biodiversity target – how would you assess the funding landscape now? Is there more available, and is it being directed to the right areas?

There is a huge question around funding. One of the EU’s most obvious failures is that the promise to deliver funding for biodiversity conservation in general, and for the management of Natura 2000 in particular, has not been realised (under the previous budget, only 10-20% of the funding for managing the network was available, and there are no indications of a major change in the current budget period). This isn’t the case across the board – you could argue that some funding streams in development aid, potentially in research, are doing better – but in the case of agriculture, for example, there is a terrible failure to invest in biodiversity-friendly farming. Meanwhile, the LIFE programme, which delivers excellent results and receives frequent praise from the Court of Auditors, remains a tiny fund and is only 0.3% of the EU budget. On the whole, the funding that is being delivered is a fraction of what is needed, and that’s despite the fact that there is a lot of evidence that investing in biodiversity and ecosystems gives a huge return on investment – in terms of money, societal benefits and job creation. We have every reason to invest more in Nature, but we are still failing to do are getting away with, for instance, the illegal

destruction of natural habitats and protected sites, and that needs to stop. In order for that to stop, the commission needs to exercise, in a much more efficient way, its role as guardian of the treaty – that’s the first thing. Second, we need new tools and much more effective inspection regimes. Some countries have very effective environmental inspectorates which can actually control what happens on the land, but others don’t. There is a clear gap for new EU legislation setting standards for environmental inspection so that everywhere in Europe has competent inspectors with the right resources, the right mandate and the right powers to actually enforce environmental legislation, including the Nature directives. In line with that, we also need to give DG Environment some direct inspection capacities. In the air safety domain, for instance, the EU has its own inspectors so that it can, in a sense, double check whether member states are doing their job, and as a result we have very safe skies. In the environment domain and for biodiversity in particular, we still have a situation where when a member state decides to turn a blind eye it becomes a magnet for illegal activities and you get pressure on others to also turn a blind eye. The results of that speak for themselves. On top of that, there are huge issues with environmental crime. The environmental crime directive is very poorly enforced, which means that in many cases criminals, assuming they are caught in the first place, are getting away with minimal sanctions that are not at all dissuasive. Meanwhile, we are too heavily dependent on the commission acting as the guardian of member states’ obligations because in most EU countries citizens and NGOs do not have proper access to justice. This means that if authorities are corrupt or negligent you cannot go to the court or get justice; the only thing you can turn to is the already not very efficient EU infringement machinery. Legislation is therefore needed to modernise and standardise access to justice across the EU. This is an obligation under the Aarhus Convention which has been signed by all the EU member states and the EU itself, but is blatantly not respected in much of Europe. Finally, there are also some issues around implementation, i.e. the way the rules are handled. We see a lot of best practice but also a lot of very messy implementation. In this

The largest UK bird of prey, the white-tailed eagle went extinct in the country during the early 20th Century

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stringent biodiversity safeguards. There is no reason why there should be conflict between the sectors, but there will be if we don’t do things properly. The new 2030 Climate and Energy Package legislation is an opportunity to fix these problems and also to make sure that they don’t arise in the first place.

Vytenis Andriukaitis, the European health commissioner, is advocating ‘health in all policies’ – is this an approach you’d like to see adopted with regard to Nature and biodiversity?

Absolutely. Biodiversity conservation cannot be seen as a ‘sector’, it needs to be part of every aspect of our economy and society. And it is very important not just to integrate biodiversity into other policies, but also to integrate all the different policies into one another. Take health, for example. Access to green spaces and protected areas has a huge impact in terms of physical and mental health, so integrating health and Nature policies is a win-win. The Natura 2000 network, aside from protecting biodiversity, can also improve the quality of life and the health of the people that live around and inside those sites, and most Europeans live within just a few kilometres of the closest Natura 2000 site.

Similarly, many of the biodiversity-related problems we face today are the same problems impacting on our health. Air pollution – which includes the emissions from intensive agriculture – kills tens if not hundreds of thousands of Europeans and also destroys biodiversity. Cleaner air would improve the conservation status of many species and habitats, as well as saving human lives and enhancing quality of life.

So-called ‘lifestyle diseases’ are another challenge, but many of these aren’t actually about lifestyle at all, they’re about bad food and bad feeding habits. If we produce better food and consume better food, we can recover biodiversity and improve health. Take meat as an example: meat consumption is the biggest contributor to our environmental footprint and we all know that we eat too much of it. There’s a gap there for a different set of policies that can help people consume less meat, but of a better quality, which means less factory farming, less dependence on feed, fewer polluting emissions and more sustainable so. It’s time now to look at the issue strategically, see where the

blockages are, and come up with a solution.

How would you like to see complementary measures such as the Common Agricultural Policy improved so as to better support the Nature directives?

There are very clear problems with the implementation of complementary policies. One of the things to have come out of the fitness check process is that biodiversity legislation per seis good and when implemented is doing its job, but its impact is in many cases being swamped by the negative impact of other policies – the most problematic of them being agriculture.

The CAP needs a fundamental rethink: the bulk of its funds are spent on subsidies for intensive agriculture – which stifles innovation and change because it preserves the usual way of doing things rather than helping people to do them in a better, more intelligent way – it fails to deliver for farmland biodiversity, and it has a harmful effect on Nature areas and threatened species far beyond farmland. We know what the problem is, and we partially know the solution, but the current policy framework is completely broken and not up to the task.

The Common Fisheries Policy has, historically, been one of the most destructive policies in terms of biodiversity. It’s undergone major positive reform, but the job is only half done: new pieces of legislation on technical measures and data are still going through, the regional management plans are yet to be adopted, and there are still problems in terms of controls and penalties for illegal fishing. There’s a lot of work to be done, but we are seeing a positive overall dynamic in terms of policy making. Another sector worth mentioning is energy. We are hopefully in the midst of a radical energy transition away from fossil fuels and towards a low and eventually zero greenhouse gas emissions economy, but this presents a lot of challenges because many renewable energies have biodiversity issues, some of which are particularly problematic – bioenergy, for instance. Even the more benign infrastructures such as windfarms or solar panels can endanger species or harm habitats, if not properly located and planned. The thing is, there is plenty of room to expand renewables without harming biodiversity – even with very

The bittern was under threat of a ‘second extinction’ in the UK in 1997 but has been saved thanks to targeted conservation efforts and significant LIFE funding

Ariel Brunner Senior Head of Policy BirdLife Europe

www.birdlife.org/europe-and-central-asia http://storify.com/NatureAlert/nature-alert

CONSERVATION & ECOLOGY

Europe we are still pretending that we are unable to know whether the farmer is ploughing up the protected grassland to plant maize or whether a Natura 2000 site is becoming a golf course.

As well as remote sensing, we should also be empowering citizens to act as controllers of what is happening on the ground. Other domains are witnessing a growing use of apps that allow citizens to report problems directly from their mobile phones, which is definitely something that could be done in the environmental domain.

But we need a much broader innovation agenda. Ultimately, we need new ways of working together with Nature, new ways of creating economic value out of natural habitats and ecosystems, and new process innovations – new ways of doing the things we’ve always been doing: agriculture, flood protection and adaptation to climate change. We live in a rapidly changing world and are facing a huge ecological crisis. If we are to have a functioning society where people have access to food, housing and beautiful Nature, are safe from extreme weather events, and are able to go on living the kind of lifestyle they want to, then we will need to change a number of things. We’ll need to restore a lot of Nature and we’ll need to do a lot of the things we do today in completely different ways, and this requires a lot of innovation in all sorts of fields. That’s the appeal I want to send to the research community: help us reinvent all sectors in an ecologically minded and biodiversity-compatible way. grazing, which can help manage natural

grasslands and so on.

What role can research and development play in protecting biodiversity?

There is huge scope for innovation in Nature conservation. I think we are still suffering from a sort of 20th Century mindset whereby innovation is associated with ‘hard’ technologies, e.g. machinery, electronics and so on, and conservation is interpreted very literally, i.e. keeping things as they are. Both have a role to play, but there is huge potential in ecological innovation which is not getting the attention it should.

Classic ICT does have a role to play. For example, technology could help us to modernise the way we control the enforcement of legislation. In particular, remote sensing could revolutionise the way that we enforce land use planning and control the way that land use change is done, which could have an enormous impact because land use change is by far the biggest cause of biodiversity loss. There is a lot of illegal land use change all over Europe – not just in the less well-governed corners of the continent but also in those countries that you would expect to be frontrunners. To be honest, it is quite embarrassing that countries like Brazil now use real-time satellite technology to, for example, combat illegal deforestation, while in

BirdLife Europe is concerned that any decision to revise the directives could have a dramatic impact on the future conservation status of some of Europe’s most beloved plants, animals and places

European Union’s ‘Innovation Union’ initiative, concentrates its efforts. According to EIP Water there are at least five key areas in which innovators should not face unnecessary blockages and barriers:

1) Access to finance; 2) Regulatory obstacles; 3) Public procurement;

4) The need to fine tune public private partnerships; and

5) Provision of testing and demonstration sites. In these areas EIP Water addresses, for example, challenges in obtaining permits for water innovation-related activities, as well as mismatches in the risk-reward balance for the financing of water innovation projects. In the area of finance for water innovation, EIP Water is promoting and supporting initiatives to give the water sector the prominence it deserves; secondly, it advocates for putting a priority on regional development programmes, such as in the design and implementation of EU countries’ and regions’ research and innovation strategies for smart specialisation called RIS3. A further focus is on municipality- oriented schemes, some of which are involved in one of the 29 EIP Water action groups – City Blueprints. The goal of this action group, with a broad variety of members in Europe and beyond, is to organise interventions at the local level to overcome barriers in the governance systems. Such barriers hinder development and the uptake of more innovative urban water governance solutions.

Led by the Directorate General for the Environment of the European Commission, EIP Water aims to collect and bring those challenges to the attention of European policy makers, and to ensure that they are fed into policy making processes. The 29 EIP Water action groups add value by offering practice- based input in the aforementioned processes.

W

ater is increasingly regarded as being the number one risk for the world economy. The pressure on ‘resource no. 1’ is increasing, and the next few years and decades require water-related technological and governance solutions, many of which will need to be truly innovative. ‘Business as usual’ and simply more efficient water management alone will not be able to address the various challenges ahead.

In contrast, investments into innovative solutions to help ensure water services maintain citizens’ quality of life and satisfy competing water demands are not happening at sufficient speed. Therefore, we are failing to benefit from the great potential of innovations developed by researchers, non-profits, innovators, small and large companies, and others. In Europe, more innovative water solutions can only be developed and implemented if:

1) The continent brings key stakeholders together to collaborate and effectively address, and remove, the main governance and regulatory barriers to water innovation; and

2) Europe increases public finance schemes to help ensure water innovators get access to appropriate kinds of funding.

These are but two of the key challenges on which the European Innovation Partnership on Water (EIP Water), established under the

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In document Selección de dispositivos y su adaptación en la estimulación eléctrica transcutánea (página 119-123)